[vlovich123]

I found that those who can’t get consistent styling and have laggy behavior on large documents don’t know how to configure it. I regularly wrote hundred page reports with embedded excel and images all embedded in Word with Math and got pretty proficient. There’s basically several things you need to do:

* Actually set up a named style for every type of content you have. Creating shortcuts for the common ones doesn’t hurt * use whatever the paid version that powers the free equation editor. It was miles better about 10 years ago * use a master document sub document approach for categorizing things. You wouldn’t have a single text file that’s 100 pages long. Split up Word that way too

I’m pretty sure I got to a state where I was using the tooling as intended because I wasn’t actually fighting the wysiwyg. Now I did switch to LateX at the end because I was tired of not having easy version control. Word has it if you enable change tracking but it can’t beat normal tooling. Also I wanted to learn latek because it felt like a worthwhile investment (it was - writing formulas in latek is wayyy faster to write and easier to maintain).

So I liked LateX just fine. Prefer Markdown / wiki these days because I don’t work with math formulas.

Disclaimer: I have zero experience with the web version and have no idea how it scales. I imagine it still does quite well on large documents but maybe browser rendering is not so good.

[amelius]

I think the point with LaTeX is that you can automate the document generation process to a great extent. For example, if you have some data, some python scripts that process the data, and some other scripts that generate figures, you can put all of that in a pipeline and build a new version of your document automatically after the data changes.

[bo1024]

Oh man, I completely forgot that wouldn't even be possible (presumably) in Word. What a pain!

[tengwar2]

The equivalent would be OLE, I think. Yes, Word can't trivially use the text output of a Python program, but then LaTeX can't trivially embed a chunk of an Excel document and have it updated automatically. Both systems make assumptions about what they will integrate with.

[bo1024]

Thanks for the info. I still consider LaTeX more modular since the only assumption it makes is the name of file you want to include.

[tengwar2]

That carries quite a few assumptions - for instance that it is a file that you are including. As the name implies, with OLE you are not including a file, but an object provided by another actively running program. Let's say you wanted a text document which contained a live video view from an IP camera. That would be feasible in OLE. Obviously you would not want to print such a document, but it's not an outlandish thing to want to make for viewing on screen.

It's not really obvious which is "better" as the two mechanisms work in very different ways. If anything, I would say that OLE can be more general, but the complexity of a minimal program to supply OLE objects is quite high compared with LaTeX.

[0101010110]

This is possible in Word (and Excel).

You can link word tables to excel and, provided your analysis updates your spreadsheet, can refresh all data instantly.

You can also refer to values in tables in the body of the text.

I know this because I worked in an environment where Word was the only option!

[vlovich123]

I’ve also programmatically programmed generation of word documents using CPAN modules in a past life. I’m sure there’s better packages these days.

[ramraj07]

I wrote multiple papers during my PhD. The theoretical one with lots of equations I wrote with latex. It’d be stupid not to. Overleaf helped though I wrote the paper over 6 years so it only helped in the end.

Then I wrote two bio heavy papers. Using word. My thesis was in word too. If you have a ton of figures and not a ton of equations it’s not the best choice to use latex.

[gattilorenz]

> If you have a ton of figures and not a ton of equations it’s not the best choice to use latex.

Last time I used Word for anything significant (a thesis) it was either word 2003 or 2007, and adding a table or inserting a new paragraph somewhere before a figure could mess up all the figure placement (sometimes the thing would literally disappear).

After that I switched to LaTeX and never looked back. Has this recently become better, or was I just unlucky/unexperienced?

[ramraj07]

If you patiently and systematically try to figure out all the layout options and settings in word, you start to understand what will and will not happen when you do any of these things. It’s still a deterministic piece of computer code? I certainly spent less time figuring out word than latex at least.

[gattilorenz]

> If you patiently and systematically try to figure out all the layout options and settings in word, you start to understand what will and will not happen when you do any of these things

Well, this is exactly what I don’t want to do in a wyswyg editor, but glad that it worked out for you

[el_oni]

I wrote my thesis in Word (graduated last friday, vivad last march). The key to stop things moving around in word is to use the "in line with text" option for images. And treat images like text. If you want it centred then justify it to the centre, dont try to place things manually.

Previous documents ive written with word i would do things like tight layouts on images, maybe with anchors, but that's a recipe for things moving around.

When i came to compile my chapters to a final document i used master document-subdocument to pull everything together. I only had a few issues with blank pages being added when exporting to pdf and that was due to my use of page breaks and section breaks.

[gattilorenz]

> dont try to place things manually

Ah, so the solution is to use Word as if it was a worse LaTeX, I see :^)

Jokes aside, the precise manual positioning of figures and such (e.g. figures at a certain height of a paragraph, with text flowing around it) was the only potential attractiveness of Word.

If that’s still broken I really don’t see the reason for switching to a program with worse typesetting (and not only) capabilities, given my use case and the fact that I’m quite comfortable with LaTeX by now

[GiovanniP]

> Has this recently become better?

You should try TeXmacs; it is not recent, but it has become smooth and it is superior to both LaTeX and Word under every point of view.

[tkuraku]

I find that lots of figures are good reason to use latex. You can programatically scale and crop, captions never get separated from the figures, and figure placement is handled in a sane predictable way.

[copperx]

> figure placement is handled in a sane predictable way.

That is not the LaTeX I know.

[gnatolf]

It does take some getting used to, I'll give you that. But it's very predictable.

Annoyingly, 'new' users, especially led by KOMAScript hints are drawn to use the 'total' positioning that is promised by using the H B P and other options. However, since these aren't holding their promises - at least not the misunderstood promised 'absolute' positioning, frustration is very often creeping in.

I've had too many co authors and friends ask me how to push figures to certain positions where all I saw was premature optimization in terms of positions and tons of wasted cycles (CPU and user) to get to intermediate solutions that are completely unnecessary if only they were saved until the last layouting runs. The change in document creation paradigm (to not care about the layout until the far end) is what 'manages' expectations and where the perceived errors mostly come from.

[teakettle42]

> If you have a ton of figures and not a ton of equations it’s not the best choice to use latex.

Strong disagree; wysiwyg editing in Word is an exercise in endless frustration, and Word’s typesetting and fonts are so ugly that it’s painfully obvious when a paper has been written using Word.

Just write LaTeX and let it do the typesetting, figure layout, citation formatting, etc. It’s less painful than Word WYSIWYG editing, and the result is far more polished.

[chipotle_coyote]

While I have a lot of complaints with Word, I have to very tepidly take issue with the accusation of ugly fonts. You may like TeX's default typefaces more than Word's, but those are just the defaults. You can set a LaTeX document in Calibri and (presuming you have an OTF version of the fonts) a Word document in Computer Modern.

Word doesn't really do typesetting, though. You can make credible camera-ready output with it if you're rigorous with styles and learn how to anchor figures and images correctly, but the line and page breaks will still say "hi, I'm a word processor."

[singingfish]

> If you have a ton of figures and not a ton of equations it’s not the best choice to use latex.

I don't really agree. You do however have to accept and become happy with one of LaTeX's ideas about what makes good figure placement though.

[hyperdimension]

> writing formulas in latek is wayyy faster to write and easier to maintain

I was told by a friend that the Equation Editor in Word would silently accept LaTeX math-mode equation syntax and convert it automatically. Besides trying it out briefly, i never used it extensively, so I'm not sure how complete it is. Still, it's there.

[ygra]

I think the LaTeX compatibility came in a fairly recent version, but the usual Unicode-based syntax is already a lot easier to type (especially on non-US keyboard layouts) and read, since it's a lot more compact and uses whitespace to separate things by default instead of requiring large amounts of curly braces.

[ahmadmijot]

Can confirm. I use the LaTeX mode in equation editor in Word quite religiously for both equations and symbols.